Yeah, But They'll Just Say...the Paralyzed Western Mind

F. Earle Fox

When I talk about how to successfully conduct spiritual
warfare against the nonsense going on all around us, I consistently get from paralyzed
"conservatives" the response --
"Yeah, but they'll just say...," followed by a typical bit of foolishness which
secular and pagan people throw at us Christians.

I will give an answer to that response, to which my correspondent
then responds, "Yeah, but they'll just say..." That goes on for about four
or five cycles until the person runs out of "Yeah, buts..." And when
we get to the end of the series, it still does not dawn on the person that there
is something wrong with this picture. He has allowed himself to be seduced
into an unwinnable position. He is accepting the premise that there is no
winning anymore, only endlessly frustrating exchanges as the above. So,
why bother? That is where most Christians stand. It is a rare
Christian who has any sense of an offense strategy. And so there are only
rare Christians who are able to get up in public and defend the name and honor
of Jesus Christ with truth and grace.

When I tell Christians that God has given us all the
equipment we need to mount an effective offensive strategy against the world,
the flesh, and the devil, they rarely believe me. They see a long line
of "Yeah, buts...." beyond which is only foggy bottom.

But the question is not whether the secular/pagan
person believes what I say, the question is whether I
believe what I am saying. Do I believe that I am explaining an objective
truth? If I do, then, in one sense, the string of "Yeah, buts...." is
irrelevant.

Christians have almost universally given up on
intelligent debate because they have no belief that they can "win" an argument
in any meaningful sense of the word.

Winning seldom means changing the
other person's mind, which is how most persons wrongly judge the matter.
It first means simply presenting an intelligent and reasonable case, and knowing
that one has done so -- not in an arrogant way, but because one has been
involved in thinking reasonably long enough to know what that kind of activity
is. It entails a humble spirit, willing to be challenged, willing to find
out that I might indeed be wrong, and willing to spell out the grounds upon
which I will accept that I have been proven wrong. We should be more interested
in honesty than in winning. Honest conversation is precisely how
God wins.

The Christian community has allowed itself to be
brainwashed by the very thing which many in it rail against -- relative truth
and morality. That is shown by the fact that in public debates, almost all
Christians argue in either a narrowly Biblical manner which is irrelevant to the
listening secular/pagan audience, or, in order to be more "relevant", they argue on
pragmatic grounds, thus undermining the very premise of objective truth which is
the foundation of all honest discussion. Christians rarely argue on the
grounds either of objective truth or objective morality. They are afraid,
one must suppose, of the wrath of the Post Modern mentality which rails against
telling anyone at all that their view is wrong. We are to be "tolerant".
You can have your truth, and I can have mine, thank you.

The cure, or part of the cure, for this foggy bottom
mentality is to learn how to attach one's arguments to the facts on the ground,
to learn how to reason logically from those facts, how to observe and marshal facts so that they
reveal some order, and how to draw conclusions from the above that are
challenging to the mind.

For example, when homosexual advocates defend their
agenda, we must ask them to explain the agenda, which means approval of
homosexual behavior. What is this behavior? (The facts on the
ground.) We must force clarity on the issues at stake, but we seldom
do. We must define our own terms carefully, and not let the opposition do
so.

Or, when non-believers tell us how religion has done such
terrible harm to the world, ask them to give concrete examples so that we can
look at the historical facts of the matter (you will hear "crusades",
"inquisition" over and over). But Christians seldom have enough
intellectual background or backbone to put the facts on the table. We are the victims of our
own ignorance and cowardice, not of the forceful arguments of the opposition,
which seldom exist.

When we get a "Yeah, but they'll just say..." reply (from
our supposed allies) , we ought to stop right there, and ask that person whether
he believes that there is any way of winning this war, whether truth counts or
not, whether the Sword of the Spirit has been nullified by the Enemy. We
need to ask whether the person believes that truth and morality are objective,
whether God is in any way relevant to winning the battle or His arm has been
shortened, whether we have been given the ability to make a serious dent in the
works of the Enemy.

We need to ask whether they understand that God holds the
intellectual, moral, and spiritual high ground, and whether they are standing
there with Him -- or even know how to.

The truth is that the evidence is all over the map.
There is not a single important issue in which the Biblical worldview and Gospel
of Jesus Christ is not able to win the intellectual, moral, and spiritual war
over any contender. But the number of Christians who believe this is
miniscule.

That needs to change, but it will happen only when we
Christians begin to reweld the two edges of the Sword of the Spirit back to back
again. We need to understand that in the Biblical view, reason and
revelation are absolutely and eternally wedded. Back to back they make an
invincible weapon. Early Christian evangelists and apologists understood
that reason and revelation were at one. But Satan also understood that he
must divide in order to conquer -- and so he did. He persuaded Christians
that reason and revelation were opposed, largely in the Post-Reformation era.
So Christians gave away reason to the secular folks, and they have been using
that sharp edge to cut the throat of the Church ever since.

"They will just say..." is surrender. We must learn
how to handle whatever they say, how to spot the manipulation, deceit, and
distinguish those from honest objections. We must learn how to market our
own beliefs with reason and revelation wedded. We will then begin to see
the Christian community regaining its intellectual, moral, and spiritual
credibility. And not before.